Deadtime (Webcast)
This article is from an Out-of-Canon perspective Deadtime was a six episode live-action webcast produced in 2012. The first four episodes were broadcast on Fridays in October 2012, with the last two episodes going live on Tuesday 30 October and Wednesday 31 October. It saw the return of a few familiar characters from the classic series of Station Zero, as well as the first visual appearances of several popular characters from the Talking Brain audios. Summary The crew of Station Zero prepares to welcome a delegation including the young Emperor Zoltan IV. A team making final security sweeps stumbles upon and accidentally activates a long-dormant machine which feeds off of both the station's stored data and the minds of those aboard to create horrifying phantasms of those who have died on the station over the years. Plot Episode 1 Commander Rebecca Tate spends time with her family aboard their quarters on Station Zero, trying to relax and take it easy before the arrival of an Imperial delegation that will include the new young Emperor himself. When an officer reports that one of the security teams has not called in from the final sweep the commander, obviously on edge, hastily assembles another team and leads them herself to find the missing. Somewhere deep in the subsections of the station, the missing team lie scattered around a large crate. Covered with decades of dust and gunge, the crate suddenly seems to shiver, then to glow from within. It emits small crackles of what seems like static electricity as one side panel falls open. A bolt of electricity zaps out and fries the commpad that lies near the team leader. Then separate bolts shoot out and enter the bodies of the unconscious team members. Dr. Roberta Anderson is in the medbay, tending to an engineer who was wounded working on some equipment earlier in the day. She hears a voice calling to her and turns quickly, but sees nothing. A moment later the voice calls again, and she realises that it's originating from a commpad on a surface nearby. She goes and activates the device, asking for the message to be repeated. There's no response, so she goes back to her patient, checks him over one last time, and sends him on his way. While she makes notes, she hears the commpad crackle again and turns to see that the display has activated. Horrified by what she sees, she flees the medbay. A technician goes and observes the display, which has frozen on the image of a man screaming. Punching some buttons on his wristpad, the technician scans the screen and runs the image through the station systems, only to back away horrified when he too realises that the man in the image is the long-dead Commander Harold Tyler. Episode 2 Roberta has rushed to Commander Tate's quarters and finds the Commander's wife, Kyoko, waiting there. After babbling out her story, Roberta collapses, semi-conscious. Kyoko helps her to a bed, then starts calling around on the commsystem to locate Commander Tate. She locates her quickly enough, but Commander Tate refuses to believe what Roberta claimed to see. She believes that the doctor may simply be overworked and due for a good long rest. Meanwhile, in the communications centre, the medical technician is scanning through old information to find out if perhaps a system scramble caused what he and Dr. Anderson saw in the Medbay. He finds plenty of old communications data on Commander Tyler, but nothing like what was on the commpad. When Communications Supervisor Den Wately finds him, the tech is unceremoniously booted out into a corridor, where he is nearly run down by a screaming group of terrified engineers. One claims they've just witnessed a craft in shuttlebay Sigma explode and that the entirety of Tier 3 is under threat. She can't understand why the alarms aren't going off and everyone isn't trying to evacuate. Somewhere in a subtier, Commander Tate leads her group to find the missing security team. She splits the team into three and they all take off in separate directions. As Commander Tate's team rounds a corner, she freezes and raises her sidearm briefly before lowering it again. The team members ask her what's wrong, what has she seen, and she can only point and cower back as she sees the horribly burned corpse of Jezebel Demain approaching along the corridor. Trivia Characters *Rebecca Tate and Kyoko Nakamura have been married for nearly twenty-five years and have a daughter, Lydia. Rebecca has been commander of Station Zero for just over a decade. *When Commander Tate was a young child on Station Zero, she would run not to her adopted father Commander Franklin when she was frightened, but to communications technician Jezebel Demain. *Commander Tate mentions the events of TV: Friction-Break (which she knows about only second-hand) and Sins of the Father, as well as the audio version of Parallels. *Roberta Anderson still regularly has nightmares about the deaths of Brock Peters (TV: Sonata for a Long Watch) and Commander Harold Tyler (TV: Stand, Flee, Fight) Objects *The mindwarp device may be the longest payoff in Station Zero history, as it harks back to Blydon Sharpe directing some of his saboteurs to "leave the crate in subtier 45" back in TV: Strike Count.